Category: Uncategorized

BREEDING CODE. “The result: Ludwig's "Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine," a programming utility that turns any normal DOS virus into a souped-up, genetically evolving polymorph, complete with an option for sexual gene-swapping between individuals that come into contact in the wild." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

GENETIC INHERITANCE. "Surveying the fossil record of this game, Ludwig found himself pondering a logical next move: what if someone were now to develop a strain of polymorphs with a genetic memory, so that rather than completely reshuffling their structure with every generation, the few mutants that escape discovery by heuristics could pass their undetectable code on to their offspring?" https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

CURATED CODE. "The only way to fully understand the phenomenon of autonomously reproducing computer programs is to take into account their one essential difference from organic life forms: they are products not of nature but of culture, brought forth not by the blind workings of a universe indifferent to our aims, but by the conscious effort of human beings like ourselves." https://lnkd.in/e6ExXVY View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL MINIMAL CELL EQUIVALENT. "He organised a contest to write the smallest possible functional self-replicating computer virus and concluded there is an absolute minimum size. He concludes from the minimum size that random processes inside a computer cannot create the smallest virus; even then such a virus could be an evolutionary dead end." https://lnkd.in/dbB7hd4 View in LinkedIn

GODLESS FERAL COMMUNITIES. "Or to put it more bluntly, feral viral ecologies (versus the controlled experiments in university labs) represent the only known simulation of life that does not implicitly (and quite unscientifically) build God into the system." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

HYPOTHETICAL OPTIONS. "Either Monod was right, life emerged as a consequence of an event that had almost no chance to occur during the lifetime of the universe, or the emergence of life is not a mere question of the probability of a single event, but a driving force exists—and can thus be discovered—to drive this process through its various stages." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

DIRECTING EVOLUTION. "In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants. This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will." https://lnkd.in/dC-NM-E View in LinkedIn

NUMBING NUMBERS. "If we consider now that a sequence made up of 100 monomers was needed for a ribozyme to have the wide range of activity allowing the polymerization of the four ribonucleotides, the probability of one single sequence would be reduced to 0.6×10(–60) and synthesizing all of them in one molecular unit over 1 billion years would lead to the synthesis of a mass of nucleic acid representing several tens that of the Earth per day." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

NUCLEIC ACID PROBABILITY. "The random formation of biopolymeric components, for instance nucleic acids, from their building blocks. The probability of a single sequence of 50 nucleotides among all possibilities corresponds to 1/4(50) ≈ 0.8×10(-30) meaning that the exploration of the complete set of sequences over 1 billion years would require the synthesis of more than 4 ×10(13) different sequences every second." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

HIGHLY UNLIKELY EVENT. "A sudden transition in a system from an inanimate state to the living state—defined on the basis of present day living organisms—would constitute a highly unlikely event hardly predictable from physical laws." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn